The Music Cognition Laboratory

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The Music Cognition Laboratory, founded in 1980, has taken an empirical approach to a wide range of topics concerning how music is perceived and remembered. The studies of tonality, pitch, and harmony helped to establish the psychological reality of music-theoretic concepts, including contemporary proposals on melodic structure and musical tension. A number of experiments have extended these investigations to music from other cultures and post-tonal music. Other research has been directed at understanding musical time and meter, including metrical hierarchies, perception of time, and rhythmic synchronization. The effect of seeing a performer on the perception and evaluation of performances has also been studied empirically, as well as emotional responses to music. Additional topics include timbre and musical development. Recent and current research is using popular music and film to study memory representations and associated autobiographical memories.

Interests: music perception, cognition, and memory, music theory, music performance, emotion, development, cross-cultural music cognition, popular music, and autobiographical memory.